When Philomath resident Jordan Indrawan was 16 years old and just a few weeks away from starting his junior year of high school, a visit to urgent care for what he thought might be bronchitis changed everything.
A chest X-ray revealed a large malignant tumor nestled in his mediastinum — the space at the center of the chest, between the lungs and against the heart. Within hours, he was in an emergency room. By that evening, an ambulance was taking him to Randall Children’s Hospital in Portland.
This Saturday at Oregon State University’s graduation program, Jordan, who lives near his mother in the Marys River Estates neighborhood just outside of town, will celebrate a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and biophysics — with minors in chemistry and Japanese.
“It wasn’t the kind of ‘yay, I’m graduating, I’m done,'” Jordan said early this week, reflecting on the milestone. “It’s more of, ‘here’s just another celebration,’ because I have another graduation in a year.”
That would be the master’s degree he’s already pursuing through OSU’s accelerated program, with research that includes the role of a specific protein in pancreatic cancer.
A diagnosis that upended everything
Jordan’s mother, Alia Yaich, who was working at Lumina Hospice and Palliative Care in Corvallis at the time, still calls that August day in 2019 “D-Day — diagnosis day.”
She had left work to pick Jordan up and take him to Samaritan Urgent Care. The nurse who examined him ordered a chest X-ray. Jordan came back from the imaging room with a feeling something was badly wrong.
“He said the person said, ‘Oh my god’ — which you don’t do in the medical field, virtually,” Alia recalled. “So for someone to have a reaction like that is unusual in the medical field, in front of the patient, especially. So he had a feeling something was bad.”
The doctor handed Alia the X-ray and told her to go to the emergency department immediately — that the image showed a large tumor in Jordan’s chest. A short time later, they had a name for it — a malignant germ cell tumor in the mediastinum. The tumor had grown large enough that it was pressing against his heart and lungs, explaining the breathing problems he had been experiencing for weeks.
An ambulance took Jordan to Portland that night.
The months that followed were defined by waiting — waiting to see if chemotherapy would shrink the tumor enough to make surgery possible, and waiting to see if the surgeon could safely remove it. The family divided their time between Randall Children’s Hospital and the Ronald McDonald House next door.
The surgery itself, on Dec. 2, 2019, was extraordinary by any measure. The tumor was nestled against Jordan’s heart, requiring a cardiac surgeon to be present in the operating room. The lead surgeon, with two or three decades of experience, had never performed a surgery quite like it. Jordan’s chest was opened. Hours passed.
“I’ll never forget when that surgeon came out of that OR and said, ‘We got it,'” Alia said. “And she’s got pictures, because she’s like, ‘this is the surgery of my career.’ She was trying to show me pictures. I’m like, I don’t want to see it.”
When Alia was brought back to see Jordan for the first time after the seven-hour procedure, he was barely conscious — but he looked up at her and said, “They said they got it.”
“He doesn’t remember it,” Alia said.
The kid who worried about school exams
What the oncology team at Randall noticed about Jordan struck them almost immediately. An oncology nurse pulled Alia aside after those first hours in the ICU.
“He said, ‘You have a phenomenal son right there,'” Alia recalled. “He had noticed something about him — that his reaction to this was different. There was a maturity there that I don’t think we see very often in that age group.”
Jordan didn’t complain about what was happening to him. He didn’t ask why. His main worries, it turned out, were for the people around him — and about keeping up in school.
“He said, ‘I’m really worried about this exam that I have,'” Alia said. “Not a medical exam — it was a school exam.”
Jordan had a tutor at home during recovery and worked with teachers at the children’s hospital during his inpatient stays. He emerged from the experience and went back to Corvallis High School. He graduated valedictorian with the Class of 2021.
“That was always important to Jordan,” Alia said.
Jordan, looking back, reflects that the experience fundamentally reshaped how he thought about stress and about life.
“I always had a thought that stress was the reason that I got there in the first place, because I knew I was a very stressful person before that,” he said. “I kind of had a feeling that that whole thought process, that mindset is what resulted in what happened to me. So I thought, this is my time to shift that mindset.”
Jordan entered OSU as a bioengineering major. From there, his academic trajectory was nothing if not winding — biophysics, then neuroscience, then an unexpected pivot toward pancreatic cancer research after joining a lab studying proteins found in muscle tissue.
“It just kind of went there,” he said. “So I decided, OK, well, maybe this is what I should do.”
He’s now a year into OSU’s accelerated master’s program, and his thesis will focus on the role of a specific protein in pancreatic cancer — research he expects to result in a published paper next year.
After that, the options are open. He’s considering a doctorate, an MD-PhD program that could take eight to 11 years, and a Fulbright fellowship that would take him overseas for a year of fully funded international research. New Zealand, the Netherlands, and Argentina are among the possible destinations.
“I want to incorporate international things into it as well,” Jordan said — a reflection, perhaps, of the life he lived before Philomath.
The world that helped make him
Jordan was born in California. At 6 months old, his mother moved the family to Indonesia, where they would spend a decade — two years on Java and eight years in Bali. Jordan’s father is Indonesian, and Bali, a global tourist hub and a place of deep cultural and spiritual richness, became home.
“Jordan went to school with people from all over the world,” Alia said. “Kids that he could learn cultures from and different backgrounds and languages.”
Jordan spoke Bahasa Indonesia. He went back and forth between Bali and Jakarta. He attended school with children from dozens of countries. When the family eventually returned to the United States — stopping first in California, then up to Oregon — the adjustment was jarring.
“When we came back to the States, I just thought, ‘Wow, the bathroom is clean,'” Alia said, laughing. “Just the simple things in life that we often, in our culture, take for granted — we saw differently.”
For Jordan, growing up between worlds left a mark he can articulate clearly.
“I don’t think I’d be who I am today without that exposure,” he said.
He pursued Japanese as a minor and studied abroad in Japan while at OSU — another chapter in what has become, for a 22-year-old, a genuinely uncommon biography.
Oregon State University will graduate a record 8,785 students at its commencement ceremony Saturday at Reser Stadium. Gates open at 9 a.m. and the ceremony begins at 11 a.m. The event is free and open to the public. Olympic gold medalist Jade Carey, herself an OSU graduate and student-athlete, will deliver the commencement address.
“I don’t think I ever took life or my future as serious as I did after that,” Jordan said of surviving cancer. “I suppose my direction in life changed — how I wanted to contribute to the world.”
He’s working on figuring out exactly what that looks like. But the direction, at least, seems clear — toward healing the disease that once threatened his life.
